Open Compute

Rackspace has publicly announced our affiliation with the OpenPOWER Foundation, and we are now an official member. OpenPOWER is a community dedicated to opening access to the lowest-level parts of servers: chips, buses, boards, firmware, and so forth. We anticipate that this movement will bring increased freedom and value to two other communities that we participate in: OpenStack and the Open Compute Project. We think that by working within this new community, Rackspace can deliver improved performance, value, and features for our customers.

Two key themes that were woven into the fabric of Rackspace::Solve New York on Thursday were velocity and agility – and that the underpinnings of our infrastructure must deliver the performance that empowers your business to achieve those goals.

At Rackspace, we believe that open source communities enable innovation and collaboration. That is why we founded OpenStack four years back and why we actively engage in the Open Compute Project as well. OnMetal is built on OpenStack software and Open Compute hardware. Listen to what the OnMetal team has to say about why we chose such a design.

Is more better? Not always, but when it comes to more industry leaders contributing to the CloudU Big Data Massive Open Online Course (MOOC); more is definitely better. As CloudU continues to extend its reach beyond its online presence, the program will sponsor the first ever Open BigCloud and Open Compute Project (OCP) Workshop at The University of Texas in San Antonio (UTSA). The event will take place Wednesday, May 7 and Thursday, May 8 on the UTSA campus.

It feels like yesterday that Frank Frankovsky, vice president of Hardware Design at Facebook and chairman of the Open Compute Project (OCP), sent me a Facebook message – how fitting – about a budding open hardware project that he was working on. At Rackspace, we immediately jumped at the chance to be among the first companies to join the community, as we believed Open Compute was poised to flip the hardware model much like we did with cloud software when we founded OpenStack.

The mood in San Jose vacillated between quiet and congratulatory as participants in the fifth Open Compute Summit shared both their plans and their successes in front of a crowd of 3,800 registered attendees, up 90 percent from the 2,000 who registered last year.

With a mission-based focus on scientific research, universities and research institutes have long been at the forefront of technology innovation that embraces open standards and ease of collaboration. By nature, the academy well understands that when hundreds of researchers contribute to a shared purpose and solve a shared problem in open and transparent ways, everyone benefits. The pace of innovation is accelerated and the diversity of solutions and approaches ensures that good solutions persist and not so good ones are quickly identified. Some might argue that the relative success of open-sourced platforms suggests that proprietary technologies often preclude necessary innovation. The growth of cloud has further challenged both researchers and industry. The scale economies of cloud-based solutions brings with it attendant challenges for the research community – beginning with the question of how to scale a conversation that brings both sides of an open community together to ensure that the full benefits of the cloud can be realized.

With OpenStack, we already have the open source software to run your data center. Now, we’re building the open source hardware to run it on. The Open Compute Project is a collaborative community of designers, consumers and innovators focused on building more efficient servers, storage and data center hardware designs for scalable computing at a lower cost.